Ball

States are being shortchanged hundreds of millions of dollars by low-ball royalties for oil and natural gas development on federal lands, a report released Thursday by a Denver-based nonpartisan think tank says, based on an analysis of seven states.

States are being shortchanged hundreds of millions of dollars by low-ball royalties for oil and natural gas development on federal lands, a report released Thursday by a Denver-based nonpartisan think tank says, based on an analysis of five western states, plus North Dakota and Texas.

Moving the ball forward on instituting new rules to govern how Wall Street does business in order to lower risk, promote transparency and protect the American public, federal regulators last week advanced the so-called Volcker Rule, which is part of the larger Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

Moving the ball forward on instituting new rules to govern how Wall Street does business in order to lower risk, promote transparency and protect the American public, federal regulators this week have advanced the so-called Volcker Rule, which is part of the larger Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

There is no doubt that shale gas will be a factor in future natural gas supply forecasts, but how big the role that turns out to be is still uncertain as a “huge learning curve” accelerates, a lead gas analyst at the California Energy Commission (CEC) told NGI last Friday.

Because Washington State’s environmental regulators did not act within the allotted statutory time frame, FERC said the state agency is “deemed” to have waived the certification requirements under the Clean Water Act (CWA) and Costal Zone Management Act (CZMA) with respect to Georgia Strait Pipeline Co. LP’s natural gas pipeline project in the Pacific Northwest.

Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corp. and the utility’s reliability coordinator, the East Central Area Reliability Council (ECAR), failed to assess and understand the inadequacies of FirstEnergy’s system, particularly with respect to voltage instability and the vulnerability of the Cleveland-Akron area, and FirstEnergy did not operate its system with appropriate voltage criteria, a final report issued last week by a joint U.S.-Canada task force examining the historic Aug. 14, 2003 blackout concludes.

Looking into the crystal ball of what implications LNG will have on conventional domestic gas sources, Raymond James analyst J. Marshall Adkins said it will depend on how much of the new gas is brought in, on what timeframe it arrives and how much it will cost.

A Senate committee investigation has concluded a “systemic and catastrophic failure” by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and other industry watchdogs allowed Enron Corp. to get away with its fraudulent activities for as long as it did.